This article analyzes how culture influences the rhetorical strategies writers employ to represent expert knowledge in the workplace and the underlying values and assumptions in a culture that enable readers to understand and evoke the knowledges represented as visual and verbal narratives. The study examines the problems of risk communication in a cross-cultural context at three levels: (a) the technical problems of representing safety information in an uncertain and hazardous environment, (b) the translation problem of multiple representations and cultural understandings in a cross-cultural environment, and (c) the rhetorical problem of defining a rational basis for argument about what constitutes safety in an economic and political context. This article expands upon previous notions of cross-cultural communication as the translation processes necessary to mediate cultural difference or translate from one culture to another. In examining risk communication within a larger global context, this article analyzes the problems writers face in applying generalized models of communication practice to solve technical problems in a culturally and politically complex global economy.

Although effective public policy depends upon accurate post‐accident reports and investigations, accident reports in a large government agency reflect a linear, sequential model of cause and effect that fails to account for the multidimensional nature of accidents in tightly coupled technologies. As a result, unions, agencies, and operators engage in fiercely contested public debates over responsibility and authority when disasters occur. In proposing a three‐dimensional model of accident analysis (both visual and verbal), this article illustrates how underlying models of causality influence the structure of technical reports and the nature of the argument over responsibility and authority in largescale technological disasters.

In critiquing the sexually loaded metaphors in James Paradis' analysis of the problem of expert knowledge in technical operator's manuals, this essay demonstrates how professional discourse formally embodies images of violence and domination that may also interfere with the responsible control of a dangerous technology. Describing the relationship between logos and ethos in professional discourse, this essay demonstrates how a feminist perspective can help technical communicators understand the pragmatic consequences of unarticulated sexual codes in scientific and technical discourse.

This article analyzes Herbert C. Hoover's translation of the De Re Metallica (1956) in the context of the 1922 Mine Strikes. The De Re Metallica combines practical instruction in mining techniques with a philosophical justification of the practice of mining. In Book I of the De Re Metallica, Agricola consciously constructs a rationalized science of metallurgy and mineralogy to enable expert miners to profit in a risky enterprise. Analysis of the text thus reveals that Hoover's interest in Agricola's “intellectual achievements” may have been more than technical. The economical and political assumptions that drive Agricola's arguments—justification of mining as a profit-making enterprise, his notions that accidents occur because workers are careless, and his rhetorical use of the notion of scientific expertise—framed many of the early twentieth century debates between mine operators and union organizers. In revisioning Agricola's arguments in the context of Hoover's own Principles of Mining and his statements in the 1922 Mine Crisis, this article demonstrates how technical documents reflect the political ideologies of their writers and how political arguments presented as purely technical debates shape the uses and construction of future technologies.

This article analyzes postaccident investigation reports from a feminist perspective to show (a) how the conventions of public discourse privilege the rational (male) objective voice and silence human suffering, (b) how the notion of expertise excludes women's experiential knowledge, (c) how the conventions of public discourse sanction the exclusion of alternative voices and thus perpetuate salient and silent power structures, and (d) how interpretation strategies that fail to consider unstated assumptions about gender, power, authority, and expertise seriously compromise the health, safety, and lives of miners—and in a broader sense—all of those who are dependent on technology for their personal safety.